Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

by Lundy Bancroft

If his verbal assaults cause her to lose interest in having sex with him, for example, he snarls accusingly, “You must be getting it somewhere else.”

If she is depressed or weepy one morning because he tore her apart verbally the night before, he says, “If you’re going to be such a drag today, why don’t you just go back to bed so I won’t have to look at you?”

drove his partner away with his verbal assaults and then told her that her emotional distancing was causing his abuse, thus reversing cause and effect.

He undermines your progress in life.

Interference with your freedom or independence is abuse. If he causes you to lose a job or to drop out of a school program; discourages you from pursuing your dreams; causes damage to your relationships with friends or relatives; takes advantage of you

financially and damages your economic progress or security; or tells you that you are incompetent at something you enjoy, such as writing, artwork, or business, as a way to get you to give ...

So while a nonabusive partner might argue with you about how you are interpreting his behavior, the abuser denies his actions altogether.

He touches you in anger or puts you in fear in other ways.

punches a hole in the wall; throws things at you; blocks your way; restrains you; grabs, pushes, or pokes you;

He coerces you into having sex or sexually assaults you.

Are you afraid of him? Are you getting distant from friends or family because he makes those relationships difficult? Is your level of energy and motivation declining, or do you feel depressed? Is your self-opinion declining, so that you are always fighting to be good enough and to prove yourself? Do you find yourself constantly preoccupied with the relationship and how to fix it?

She may soon find herself reassuring him that she won’t leave him, that she still loves him, that she doesn’t think he’s a terrible person.

The theatrical part fades as he becomes less concerned about losing the relationship, confident now that she is fully under his control and won’t leave him.

The more time he has to hurt you emotionally, the more likely your energy and initiative are to diminish, so that it gets harder to muster the strength to get out. The more damage he does to your relationships with friends and family, the less support you will have for the difficult process of ending the relationship. The longer you have been living with his cycles of intermittent abuse and kind, loving treatment, the more attached you are likely to feel to him, through a process known as traumatic bonding

Abused women aren’t “codependent.” It is abusers, not their partners, who create abusive relationships.

One of the earliest lessons I learned from abused women is that to understand abuse you can’t look just at the explosions; you have to examine with equal care the spaces between the explosions.